Speaking with Edward Tye, president of Durham Union

On June 12th I spoke at the Durham Union, a standalone student society (and charity) like the similarly named but better-known organisations at Oxford and Cambridge. The current president, Edward Tye, had emailed me out of the blue before Christmas inviting me to visit, and I had agreed while warning him that he would come under heavy pressure to cancel the invitation once it became known, that he would probably not be able to find anyone to share a platform with me and that if he did they would probably end up pulling out, probably shortly beforehand with the intention of getting the event cancelled. I asked him not to waste my time and insult me, as several other student societies have, by inviting me and then reneging—or, worse, simply ghosting me, as Cambridge Union did a few years ago.

Edward dealt with the empty-chair problem by deciding to run the event as an “in conversation”, that is, with just him and me on the platform, and lots of time for questions, some pre-submitted and some from the floor. Then nothing happened until two weeks before the event, when Durham Student Union, the university’s Trans Association and QueerSphere (its LGBT association) published a joint statement saying that inviting me was “irresponsible and uncaring”, and asking Durham Union to “account for itself”. As the event approached, the Student Union arranged an alternative event on the night “centring trans voices”, and urged those who came to hear me speak to “ask Helen Joyce the difficult questions she needs to answer about her views”. (Here’s a writeup in the Durham University magazine, The Palatinate.)

Apart from its childish tone, this all strikes me as completely reasonable. Everyone is entitled not to come to an event where I’m speaking: it’s a right almost every human being alive has exercised without exception. Others are entitled to put on events whenever and wherever they like (although I do wish it would occur to them that they might be the baddies, given that I and those considering coming to my event aren’t denouncing them, let alone behaving in such a way that they will have to take elaborate security precautions). As for turning up and asking me difficult questions, I’d be only too pleased. It would make a nice change from the usual emotional blackmail and question-begging.

Then, the week before the event, Edward emailed to ask if we could have a call. It was going ahead, he assured me, but the university had asked for extra security measures, and he wanted to talk them through with me. I was being moved to a different hotel because the one I was booked into was known to be where the society usually puts up guests, and they didn’t want a protest outside. The event was being moved too, but nobody was being told: attendees were to check in at the original location and then be escorted to the new one. Six security guards had been hired. And finally, I was being disinvited from the drinks reception afterwards because otherwise the university would have insisted on bouncers. The cost would have been prohibitive.

We’ve all got so used to this that we forget how surreal it is. I’m not a member of a crime syndicate or the president of a country at war. But of course I was so pleased that it was going ahead that I agreed to all of it (and in any case there was no one to complain to: Edward was the person coping with a degree of fuss totally out of proportion with anything else he had done in his stint as society president, not the person demanding that degree of fuss).

The evening of the event, I found out that behind the scenes things had been a bit nastier. The main duty of incoming presidents of Durham Union, Edward told me, is to put together the events programme, and this job falls to them alone. And back in January, when he presented the programme he had curated to the society’s standing committee—ten students holding positions such as treasurer, secretary and so on, as well as the current president and president-elect—one of them (he didn’t tell me which one) complained that I shouldn’t have been invited because I was “controversial”. A vote was then called, even though the programme was Edward’s decision alone. Everyone else voted against his decision (here is The Palatinate’s writeup, published the evening of my event).

When Edward told me about this, he was still a bit stunned by it, as people always tend to be after their first brush with trans exceptionalism. I can’t remember whom I first heard saying it, but I’ve said it many times since then myself: “Nobody expects the Tranish Inquisition.” (Here’s the reference, if you weren’t brought up on British comedy. I’m not sure it’s all that funny if you didn’t see it when it first aired, more than 50 years ago).

I thought it was pretty brave of Edward to ignore the vote, even though it was an empty gesture. Much silencing and cancellation is like this—shaming and moral grandstanding rather than actually threatening or firing. But humans are tribal creatures, and shaming feels pretty awful. I think most people would have withdrawn my invitation at this point, and it’s to his credit that that didn’t seem to have occurred to him.

Well, the event went off smoothly—of course I can’t know whether, if there had been no special security, things would have been different. It was a relatively small audience, perhaps 50 people, probably because some would-be attendees worried about being seen to attend but also because lectures have finished for the year and quite a lot of students are no longer around. The society had solicited questions beforehand, which could be submitted anonymously. About half (discounting a few trollish ones) were apparently denunciations of my transphobia; most of the rest were from people saying they agreed with me but didn’t dare to say so publicly.

The evening kicked off with a statement from Durham Student Union’s welfare officer, who stood up, introduced herself and said she was available to talk or provide support if anyone felt the need. (I didn’t see anyone take her up on that afterwards.) Edward asked me to explain how I had got interested in the subject, and proceeded swiftly to taking questions from the floor.

Almost all of them were sincere, though several were revealing of widespread misinformation—lots about intersex, for example. (No clownfish or “your toilet at home”, thankfully.) The smartest question of the evening was in response to my talking about how young women believe this stuff because they’ve been indoctrinated into it: indoctrinated by whom, a young man asked. Mainly by other women, I answered (I have written previously about this, see below).

Someone else asked whether I thought trans ideology’s sheer illogicality and obvious falsehood, plus the harm to women’s rights, meant that it would inevitably fail. Far from it, I said: stupid and nasty belief systems, in particular about women, can persist—just look at Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan. I think America will probably eventually stop sterilising children, but I think it’s quite possible blue states will settle on a sort of “men’s right to roam”, meaning that women lose all rights to any space or service where men don’t have the right to enter. That, the questioner said, was not what he expected or wanted to hear.

Most of those in the room were men, and nearly every question came from a man. One exception was the welfare officer, who read out a question about why I wouldn’t acknowledge that many, many people had hugely benefited from transitioning, as she knew personally (I said plenty of people would tell you they had been hugely benefited by becoming born again, but that doesn’t mean their beliefs are true or that they have any right to expect the rest of us to play along). Another student officer, perhaps diversity and inclusion, came up after the event and asked repeatedly and belligerently why I couldn’t see that my insistence on policing single-sex spaces on the basis of appearance would mean great problems for “gender non-conforming women”. Apart from these two, only one other woman asked a question: whether I agreed that trans ideology made much greater demands of women than of men (hell yeah).

Debating societies generally skew male—men seem to find an evening spent in abstract argument more fun than women do (I find it tedious myself, and never went to any such event when I was a student). But events on sex and gender tend to buck that trend. I think this event was open only to members of the debating society, which explains part of the gender gap. But there were women in the room, and most of them stayed silent. Mystery solved afterwards, when two of them came up to me to say they were “huge radfems” who completely agreed with me but didn’t dare let that be known in their friendship groups because they didn’t fancy being ostracised by everyone they knew.

The cost of speaking up on this issue is so much greater for women, especially young women. Among the reasons are greater social policing of views in women’s friendship groups than men’s, the societal expectation that women are “kind” and exist mainly to serve others, especially men, as Victoria Smith so ably describes in her book “Unkind”. But the big thing, I think, is simply that talking accurately about sex has been made taboo. Taboos can attach to anything—I’m old enough to have been brought up to believe that referring to a woman as “she” in her presence was horrifically rude. (“Who’s ‘she’? The cat’s mother?” was the inexplicable phrase used to tell off a child who did this.)

Taboos are sustained by discomfort and shame: you’re made feel like a bad person, or at least low-class, for breaking them. But a taboo can’t survive once enough people push through the discomfort. As I was bundled into my taxi and off to my hotel (while everyone else went to a drinks reception, presumably to discuss what I had said, hmph), I felt pretty positive that if we keep going we’ll witness a “preference cascade”—one of those exciting tipping-point moments when the social cost of honesty falls enough that people start saying what they truly think, at first in a trickle and then in a flood.

PS: I’m told the video will be uploaded to YouTube in due course—I’ll share it when that happens.

I’ve been doing some freelance work unrelated to the Gender Wars, and slightly randomly it’s involved my learning more about the phenomenon known as burnout. It inspired some reflections about my former life as a foreign correspondent, and — since everything is about gender, in the end — about how burnout plays out in this fight and how combatants can protect themselves.

The first thing I found out is that I had a lot of misconceptions about burnout. I had thought it simply meant you had worked so hard and so unhealthily you collapsed — which is sort-of true, in that overwork and unhealthy working habits are a major part of it, but also not true because there are plenty of types of overwork and unhealthy working habits that don’t put you at risk of burnout, for all that they still cause severe physical and mental harm. Conversely, your workload may not be anything out of the ordinary, objectively speaking, but you can still be at risk of burnout.

The term was formally defined seven years ago by the World Health Organisation as “an occupational syndrome resulting from chronic workplace stress that has not been successfully managed”. It has three elements: emotional exhaustion, impaired performance and what is sometimes called “depersonalisation” — a sense of distance, unreality, detachment and cynicism. A fourth element, feelings of guilt and self-blame, is so standard that some argue it should also be included in the definition.

This conceptualises burnout as solely about work. That was intentional: the WHO wanted employers to be responsible for prevention and mitigation. But the same phenomenon can happen in other situations, for example if someone is under extreme, unrelenting pressure as an unpaid carer. So I’m going to ignore the workplace part of the definition: I don’t approve of altering the definition of a phenomenon in this instrumental way.

In brief, the path to burnout starts with something that at first glance seems counterintuitive: a honeymoon phase. During this period people feel full of energy. They’re creative and enthusiastic and throw themselves into their work.

That’s great, of course, and plenty of people are like this without being on course to burn out. The issue is when people don’t pace themselves, establish healthy patterns of working or protect their downtime. Work bleeds into everything and boundaries become blurred.

When people become too tired to keep going at this extreme pitch, their performance and enthusiasm start to fade. Then they have to try harder for the same outcome. They may start to eat or drink too much, and exercise and sleep too little, in an attempt not to fall behind. They’re now really overworking because their effectiveness has diminished.

Unless they course-correct, this may progress to feeling constantly stressed, further deterioration in performance and outbursts of crying or rage. Even at this point, a sufferer typically doesn’t realise what is happening: the path to burnout is characterised by denial. Often, it’s obvious to other people what is happening long before it is to the sufferer.

The final phases of burnout are characterised by chronic energy depletion and seriously impaired work performance. People start to feel apathetic and detached. Eventually working becomes impossible. By this point sufferers are likely to be clinically depressed and to have to stop working entirely. Recovery may require expert help.

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I first met Maeve Halligan just over a year ago, at the Oxford Literary Festival, where I was being interviewed by Julie Bindel. Maeve asked an excellent question from the floor, about what young women like her could do at university when not only their fellow students but their lecturers were all on board with gender woo, and dissenting from it in class or assignments, or even being known to question it, would mean social death, disciplinary issues and quite possibly a worse degree classification.

From memory I said I thought young people needed to be cautious. It is easy to say that everyone just needs to be braver, but with things as they are a lot of people can be as brave as they want and all that will change is that they will have their lives destroyed and become yet more object lessons that can be used to terrify everyone else into compliance. I suggested that students might need to stay quiet until they had graduated, but that then they should write to their lecturers, heads of department and university vice-chancellors, telling the adults who were supposed to be opening their minds and teaching them how to think just how badly independent-minded young people are being let down by universities and that those adults are disgraces to the ideals of academia.

I don’t know if Maeve, or anyone else listening, did anything like this. But fortunately she and two other young women in the audience I didn’t know at the time ignored my suggestion that they keep their heads down.

I talked to one of them, Serena Worley, afterwards in the excellently named Turf Tavern, where she told me her TERF origin story — heading off to university in Oregon as a fully signed-up member of the trans cult who had agreed to share a room with a “trans woman”; realising over several horrible months that this person was just a man, and a disturbing one at that; being shunned when she spoke the truth as she saw it and sought support; dropping out, moving back home and then finally moving to the UK to restart her education.

I don’t remember the details of my conversation with Thea Sewell that day. But she has told me since that she came to the event because she had started to have doubts about gender ideology and wanted to hear what Julie and I had to say. She then bought our books, and Kathleen Stock’s too — and a little while later they were seen in her room at Christ’s College Cambridge and she was sent to Coventry by the entire student body, including all her friends.

Some months later, in October 2025, the three of them founded the Cambridge University Society of Women as the only Cambridge student society that restricts membership to actual women — unlike, for example, Women in Business, Women in Law, the Society for Women in the Arts and all of the self-described “feminist” societies in various colleges. Despite the university’s student union taking several months to register the new society and eventually doing so only begrudgingly (women talking together without any men present “contradicts” its ethos, apparently), CUSW has gone from strength to strength, growing in membership and inviting a series of stellar speakers to talk about issues of specific interest to women.

You can find out more about these three brilliant young women and the society in this interview by my colleague Nicole Jones for the Sex Matters podcast.

Sex Matters News

Cambridge University Society of Women

In this week’s episode of our podcast, Sex Matters’ Nicole Jones speaks to Maeve Halligan, Thea Sewell and Serena Worley, co-founders of the Cambridge University Society of Women (CUSW…

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4 months ago · 116 likes · 17 comments · Nicole Jones

It’s also worth reading this interview with Maeve in the Tab, a student magazine. My favourite bit is her excellent riposte to the ridiculous “what about intersex?” question: “Cambridge University has 24,912 students for the academic year 2024-25. To put this into perspective for you, 0.018 per cent of this number [the share of the general population that has the sort of DSD that used to be described as ‘intersex’] is about five people. If anyone with a DSD at Cambridge wants to join the society, they are more than free to come and speak to me about it at any time. Having a DSD does not mean that you are somehow ‘sexless’.”

With Julie at OLF. Photo by Milli Hill

For Julie and me the OLF event was sweet vindication after years of being ignored by literary festivals (Julie also spoke the same day about her book “Feminism for Women”). But I’m sure she’d agree that the most important thing we did that day was provide the pretext for those young women to meet — not just each other but other brilliant young people, including Connie Shaw, a young TERF who now works for the Free Speech Union and who was finishing up her degree at Leeds University at the time. Thea walked up to her and said how nice it was to know there were like-minded young people; they are now good friends.

I saw all four of them again on May 14th*, when Maeve was speaking at a Cambridge Union event and her two co-founders and Connie and I were in the audience. Her speech was astonishing, as was her delivery. Serena also spoke from the floor, very powerfully. The whole event was filmed, and if you have the time it’s worth watching.

Buck Angel spoke first and she was pretty impressive. I have mixed feelings about her: she is a pornographer and I have no doubt that the extraordinary degree to which she passes (when dressed) has lured many self-hating young lesbians to transition. But she has also been remarkably brave in speaking honestly about the harms of testosterone to a woman’s body, a topic about which the doctors who prescribe it remain entirely silent.

The other speakers were awful. Andrew Boff is indescribably self-serving and hateful — he literally scoffed out loud when Maeve mentioned Keira Bell. An American chap, Alphonso David, who I’m told played a part in the destruction of the Human Rights Campaign by gender ideology, talked pure gibberish. Sammy McDonald, a former president of the Cambridge Union, is just the sort of self-satisfied, ignorant little twerp who reminds me why I never went to things like this when I was a student at Cambridge. Helen Webberley’s performance was disgusting even by her own standards — she closed by saying everyone on the opposite side of the debate to her had blood dripping down her hands.

If you can’t stomach the whole thing, watch Buck, who opened the debate, from about 10 minutes in; the intervention by Serena at one hour 17 minutes and Maeve herself from an hour 20 minutes in. (Perhaps also the most unintentionally hilarious bit of the evening: an intervention from the floor by a young woman who said she realised she was trans by listening to The Archers, at 37 minutes 40.)

I don’t know if any of this — the friendships, the society, the speaking of truth in such a captured venue and the viral clips from the debate — would have happened if these young women hadn’t met in person at an event where they could be sure everyone else was on-side. Together, they were able to come up with the plan for the society, knowing they wouldn’t be on their own. As Thea said to me a few days ago: “Going to that one event totally changed the course of my life.”

And as a group they can provide mutual comfort and support, which is incredibly important when they live and work in such a hostile environment. Other students routinely leave rooms when they enter, ostentatiously take photographs and videos of them on the street and whisper audibly in college libraries and bars behind their backs. Working from home as I do, and moving almost entirely in spaces where I know others agree with me, I simply cannot imagine enduring it. I know because they’ve told me that they feel they couldn’t do it without each other, but even with each other it takes remarkable courage and grace.

They have become a public example of honesty and bravery to other young people, some of whom have got in touch. There is now a thriving little ecosystem of gender-critical young people who chat online, arrange events and offer each other companionship and support. More great things are sure to come out of that — most recently another genuinely women-only student society, this one focused on sport, set up by one of their buddies, Eloise Schultz at Leicester University.

Transactivists knew what they were doing when they put so much effort into getting gender-critical events pulled by refusing to be “co-platformed” with us, deluging venues with complaints and, on the rare occasions that such tactics failed, staging aggressive and noisy protests outside. When like-minded people meet in person, it gives them courage. This is especially important when the opinion they share is one that their peers have insisted is bigoted and held by almost no one. If I may be allowed to be briefly sentimental, in any final reckoning of the good I have done in my life, unwittingly helping to provide a pretext for these young people to meet will come pretty high up.

I don’t think I’m being particularly self-aggrandising in saying this; all I did was turn up and talk. The person who really stuck her neck out to make the event happen was Sally Dunsmore, the festival director, who came under a lot of pressure to revoke my invitation. She’s a serially brave person, and we’d be in a much better place if there were more like her in the arts. I’m going to drop her a note now and let her know how much good she did that day. I wonder how much more good she’s done that she doesn’t even know about.

*I originally typed June 14th, not May 14th. D’oh.

I don’t know why Rattley wears enormous rubber breasts. I don’t have a window into any man’s soul. But for some men who do this, it’s definitely part of a fetish. To take just one recent example, photographs and videos of Bryon Noem, husband of Kristi, Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security secretary, published by the Daily Mail show him posing and pouting while wearing colossal fake breasts. The article claims that Noem sent around $25,000 to women he interacted with online, expressed a desire to become a “trans bimbo” and told a friend that he wanted “huge, huge ridiculous boobs”. If the photos are genuine and the claims accurate, this is the fetish of “bimbofication” — becoming sexually excited at the idea of being turned into a brainless, exaggeratedly feminine human doll.

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I recently had an exchange that was interesting and somewhat frustrating (on both sides, probably) with someone I have a lot of respect for. He’s someone I chat with now and then about cultural issues and I don’t worry about policing my speech with him because the way we got to know each other was through free-speech activism.

He dropped me a message asking if what he described as the “new wave of extreme trans ideology” and also various other strands of the identitarian left were being “driven by 18-30 white women”. He didn’t mention why he was asking, but it’s an obvious question. Both generally — this is the group that is most likely to support gender self-ID, say it’s going to vote Green and so on — and right now, because a really good article describing the extent of this demographic’s disaffection had just been published in the New Statesman.

That article makes the point, with copious evidence including new polling, that for all the attention paid to angry, politically radicalised young men, young women are at least as angry and radicalised, only they have veered very far to the left rather than the right. I won’t go into why I think this might be, except to say (with considerable foreboding) that living online and communicating largely through social media creates feedback loops that may amplify initially trivial differences into enormous ones.

But to return to my acquaintance’s question, surely it’s obvious that it cannot possibly be teenage girls and young women that drove all this stuff into legislatures and boardrooms — they just don’t have the institutional power. We’re not just talking about consumer tastes, we’re talking about laws, workplace policies and public spending. Even though young women have more power now than they have ever had in any previous society, and even though universities are engaged in a destructive feedback loop between female academics and their female students on courses mostly taken by young women, the constellation of far-left opinions on race, gender, the climate and Palestine my acquaintance was talking about has been in the ascendant since shortly after the turn of the century — much earlier than this radicalisation really got going.

The radicalisation of young women seems to me to have followed this institutional turn, not caused it. And that turn was driven not by young women but by some middle-aged men who went all in on it, and many more who got on the bandwagon because even if they thought it was all dumb they didn’t actually care one way or the other and it was the fashionable thing to do. Why that happened is another story. For now, my point is that it was not led by young women.

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I’m very sorry to have gone quiet in the past few weeks – I’ve been overwhelmed with clashing deadlines, a situation that should now ease since I’ve reduced my commitments (not to gender-critical campaigning). Perhaps the most consequential thing that happened while I was too busy to write about it was the decision by Girlguiding to require boys and men to leave the organisation by September. Having been one of the most disgraceful organisations to fall to trans inclusion, it is now, finally and painfully, dragging itself back out again.

This really should never have happened. And not just because it’s wrong and dangerous to include boys “as if” they were girls, and men “as if” they were women, but because Girlguiding is a charity with a Royal Charter that names its beneficiaries as girls. Only girls. Charities are given tax breaks because their charitable objects are recognised as for the public good, and people donate to them in order to pursue their objects. They simply aren’t free to spend money except on those objects, and on their stated beneficiaries. Sometimes that may mean spending money on other people – for example if you’re a charity for children you might put on events for parents – but you do this because you genuinely think this benefits the group you exist to serve. Admitting boys and pretending that they are girls obviously harms girls rather than benefitting them. Doing it was always, to put it bluntly, a type of theft, both from taxpayers and from donors.

Of course Girlguiding denied that this is what it was doing by playing the usual wordgames – insisting that “trans girls are girls”. But whatever about material reality, this was simply never true legally. The UK has never had gender self-ID. The only people who even arguably count as members of the opposite sex for any legal purpose are those with gender-recognition certificates, who must be over 18. The Charity Commission should have stepped in immediately to stop this. But that would mean admitting it had been wrong all along.

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Last weekend I spoke at a conference focused on the Irish Gender Recognition Act in Dublin. Much of what I said will seem familiar to people who follow my work, but I think I managed to express why gender self-ID is harmful to women rather than men better than I have before.

I think the most useful thing I can do today is to lay out what I see as the “TERF Island playbook”: whatever the specifics of a country’s laws, the fightback has the same steps, broadly speaking, and it’s worth thinking about it at that high level as well as in granular detail.

One way you can think of legal gender recognition is as part of a broader cultural shift that goes back centuries, that started as something that started good but overshot, and that’s individualism/ liberalism. If you think about the conservative-liberal spectrum, for conservatives, there is a shared human nature, and the point of society is to try to give life to shared ideals, which will inevitably involve societal impositions and restraints on individuals. For liberals, being a good, happy and flourishing individual is primarily about the freedom to make our own decisions and to choose for ourselves what it means to live the “good life”.

A so-called liberal democracy is an attempt to combine and balance the two ideals, which both have a lot to offer, within the human-rights framework, which is based on a shared understanding of what it is to flourish as a human, but many of those rights are to make our own choices and express ourselves as we wish. It’s built into the system that rights sometimes collide, and are often constrained by the compromises required to share a society with others. To quote the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”

But what’s happening now is that we’ve pushed out past the liberal side of this balance to a new extreme: to the position that each person has a true self that they get to choose or discover by introspection, and gets to tell the world who they are. There is no role then for other people to say anything other than “I affirm you.” People are who they say they are.

This new belief system means abandoning the healthy individualism of classical liberalism, which involves respect for differences of opinion and emphasis on “freedom rights”. Within it, notions of a shared human nature and the common good are no longer regarded as normative or aspirational but instead as coercive. It prioritises freedom to do as thou wilt. It’s freedom for the strong, not the weak; freedom to impose, not freedom from being imposed upon. It’s all about the swinging fist, with no concern for where the nose begins.

And that’s why it’s women who suffer when you say that “man” and “woman” are opt-in categories. It’s just fact – unwelcome fact, but fact nonetheless – that women are physically weaker, that we’re the rapeable sex, that we bear nearly the entire burden of reproduction, that we commit few violent crimes and almost no sexual ones, and are victimised far more often than we victimise. We need “freedoms from” more than men do, and men enjoy “freedoms to” more than we do. Freedom for women means constraints on men.

So self-ID is a men’s rights movement. Not a movement for genuine “men’s rights” – things that are actually due to men and that most men are interested in, to be clear – most men don’t want to destroy women’s spaces and services and sports. Nonetheless the only people who benefit are men, and other men pretty much are unaffected.

It’s women, not men, who lose out by allowing people to define their own sex for the purpose of single-sex spaces, services and sports.* I do acknowledge that men have privacy rights too, and most men don’t actually want women who identify as men in their spaces – but not that many women who identify as men are actually deluded enough to use men’s spaces, and the few that do are at least not a threat. The other way round the calculus is completely different. This is a movement that takes away from women and gives to men.

There’s a whole interesting thing about why it is that it’s women who are more likely to tell pollsters that they’re supportive of this. But I’ve no time for that today – have another conference next year and invite me back and I’ll talk about why No, this Isn’t All The Fault of Women, Specifically Feminists. But it’s not nothing to do with women either.

Well, this new way of thinking about things is making a lot of headway, but it’s by no means hegemonic, and everywhere it arises, some pre-existing norms and rules and structures survive. To the extent that we can use and ideally strengthen those pre-existing norms and rules and structures, we can contain the harms and then hopefully squeeze the space left for them more and more until the new ideology returns to being marginal.

And that in a nutshell is the “TERF Island” playbook. It starts with shoring up laws protecting freedom of speech and belief, in particular in the workplace. If people can’t say that there are two sexes and that sex can’t change while holding down a job, then they won’t say it. The most powerful silencing force is the fear of being indigent. Hardly anyone will speak up if they risk not being able to pay their mortgage or put food on the table.

I’m not sure that Maya Forstater, the CEO of Sex Matters – my and Fiona McAnena’s colleague – understood her employment-tribunal case against her employer, the Center for Global Development, in this light at the time, but with hindsight it was the first stage in this playbook. Maya lost her job because in 2018 she said publicly that she opposed the UK government’s plans to introduce legal gender self-ID – to make it cheap and easy to change your recorded sex on demand. It took her four years, and a harrowing loss at first instance, before she won on appeal; established the precedent that so-called “gender-critical belief” was sufficiently respectable that being fired for holding and expressing it was a breach of UK employment law; and received compensation for her employer’s unlawful discrimination against her.

So what was Maya’s dangerous belief? It had three parts: (1) that sex is real, binary and immutable; (2) that being able to say so is important; and (3) that this is especially so for women’s rights. It’s extraordinary to think that almost exactly five years ago, a UK judge ruled that this mainstream position was so beyond the pale that someone who stated it could be cast out of polite society, stripped of the protection of the law and left unable to make a living.

Since then a series of legal victories citing that precedent have firmly established that, in the UK, it is possible to speak the truth about the two sexes and keep your job. Of course, not all employers have yet got the message, but it is spreading.

Now the next step is under way: using this freedom not merely to state abstract truths about the two sexes, but to advocate for sex-based rights in the workplace and elsewhere. Because free speech isn’t “just” speech – it’s advocacy. Women don’t merely want to be able to accurately refer to people’s sex, and to say that sex matters, we need to speak honestly about sex because our rights depend on doing so. In this sense, gender-critical speech is advocacy for sex-based rights. A series of cases in the past year, including one taken by Nurse Sandie Peggie against the hospital where she works in Scotland and another by a group of nurses working in Darlington, have involved female employees who don’t merely want to say they think men can’t be women in general, but to say that a specific man isn’t a woman, and that therefore he should get out of their changing rooms.

These cases were already under way when, in April last year, the UK Supreme Court ruled in the case of For Women Scotland (FWS) that the protected characteristic of sex in the Equality Act really means sex – male and female – not “sex as modified by a gender-recognition certificate” and certainly not self-identified gender. The Equality Act is a consolidation act that replaced most pre-existing equality and anti-discrimination law as well as adding some new elements. The judgment used the principles of statutory interpretation and an examination of the purpose of the Equality Act – namely to tackle longstanding, entrenched discrimination based on objective characteristics – and came to the conclusion that the law simply couldn’t function any other way.

The judgment didn’t expressly say this, but what it was doing was reasserting the importance in law and everyday life of the material reality of sex. It was based on recognising that women experience sex discrimination because of their sex, not because of how they identify. The brute fact of being female – of belonging to the sex capable of getting pregnant, even if you as a particular woman don’t ever get pregnant, or indeed can’t personally get pregnant – is why women have been exploited and oppressed throughout recorded history.

What the FWS ruling did is put the notion of gender identity, of transition, back in its box. People can think of themselves as trans and “identify” as the opposite sex if they want – that’s freedom of belief and speech – but doing so is not going to change the category they are in for the purposes of anti-discrimination law. And since the legal underpinning for female-only and male-only spaces, services and sports is precisely that anti-discrimination law, the ruling means that identifying as trans makes no difference to the category an individual belongs in for such purposes.

For decades pretty much everyone has been in agreement that you can “live as the opposite sex”, and that part of what that means is using opposite-sex spaces. But now the UK’s highest court has ruled that you simply don’t have the right to do that, not now, not ever. Not if you take hormones. Not if you have surgery. Not if you get a gender-recognition certificate. At the same time we have been taking and winning cases on freedom of speech and belief. We still need a really good case establishing that you don’t have to use preferred pronouns, but the direction of travel is clear. It’s not quite all over bar the crying, but that moment is getting closer.

So what would a gender clinic be able to offer once the crying is over too?

For adults, I think they could offer cross-sex hormones and extreme cosmetic surgery as a consumer product – that is, without any claims of alleviating medical symptoms, with full disclosure that nothing being offered will change a person’s legal or social status or give them any new rights or oblige anyone else to do anything, and with an honest description of the costs and risks. Needless to say, none of this would be paid for by taxpayers or insurers, and any doctor who offered would have sky-high malpractice insurance premiums.

And what about children? As far as I’m aware there is nowhere in the world where extreme cosmetic surgeries are provided to minors. But even before we get to a more general understanding that this is what the gender clinics are in truth offering, I think that taking the use of opposite-sex spaces, now or in the future, off the table deals a fatal blow to paediatric gender-affirming care.

Think about it: what precisely is the offer of gender clinics to children, as distinct to adults? It’s that you can be redirected to the other sex’s puberty and that if you start early you will pass better. The promise of the pathway that starts with childhood social transition and proceeds to puberty blockers and then cross-sex hormones is that you’ll end up living in true stealth: indistinguishable from people of the sex you wish you were.

But the For Women Scotland judgment means that you won’t be able to use the spaces for that sex, at least not lawfully. Sure, there’s no such thing as toilet police and if you really do pass nobody will know. But crucially, if you’re never going to be entitled to be treated in everyday life as a member of the opposite sex, that’s simply not something clinicians can sell you. They can’t offer kids a treatment that is predicated on that child doing something the Supreme Court has said they have no right to do because if they did, that would infringe on other people’s rights.

Which takes me back to fists and noses. One person’s right to identify how they like ends where other people’s right to set their own boundaries begins. Some freedoms are “from” and some freedoms are “to”, and a man’s freedom to declare himself a woman isn’t compatible with a woman’s freedom from men going where they aren’t welcome.

*Typo fixed post-publication — this originally read “men, not women”, d’oh!

After the high of hearing that the puberty-blockers trial had been paused, it was a pretty depressing week. I had genuinely thought that Wes Streeting, the health secretary, had been responsible for the pause — when ministers work out that a policy is, in the words of Sir Humphrey, “courageous”, that viewpoint tends to percolate out through the system, even reaching independent regulators and even if they have been saying for weeks or months that it’s out of their hands. But it has emerged that the decision to pause the trial was down to a sole brave official in one of the relevant regulatory bodies, Professor Jacob George, the recently appointed chief medical and scientific officer of the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA), who looked hard at the research design and ethics, asked the tough questions and suspended the trial, saying it would only be restarted if the research team at King’s College London could provide satisfactory answers.

George was outed as having been instrumental in the decision to pause by Cathy Newman of Channel 4 and Times Radio. Both she and Natasha Loder, health editor at The Economist, have said publicly that they received tipoffs to look at George’s tweets from before he worked at the MHRA, which revealed him to hold so-called “gender-critical” beliefs. Newman broke the news that the MHRA had recused him from any involvement in or oversight of the trial as a result, and Loder then published screen captures of four of his posts.

It’s hardly the first time transactivists have used the mainstream media or social media to surface vague allegations of “transphobia” or bias in the hope of bumping employers into hasty action. The most direct parallel is probably with the case of barrister Allison Bailey, who was sanctioned by her chambers, Garden Court, after anonymous Twitter users tweeted describing her as transphobic because she had been involved in the launch of LGB Alliance. Rather than follow its own procedures for dealing with such allegations Garden Court panicked — and ended up losing in a case brought by Bailey in the employment tribunal. By now employers should be wise to this sort of weaponisation of their disciplinary processes.

I’m too conflicted to write more about this entanglement of journalism and retribution for whistleblowing, since Loder is an ex-colleague. If you want to read more about it, Sex Matters wrote to the MHRA over the weekend, calling on the regulator to reverse its decision to recuse Professor George from the trial and setting out the timeline of the events. So instead the rest of this article will look at the arguments for and against the trial, some of which featured in the MHRA’s decision to pause it and some of which were aired on X in the days leading up to the recusal.

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This picture and another of Watson below used with permission; contact me if you want to ask the copyright-holder to use either

Regular readers will remember that in November 2023 I took part in a panel discussion at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London. Also on the panel was Freda Wallace, a trans-identifying man. Afterwards I tweeted a few times – in very restrained terms, considering Wallace’s grotesquely offensive behaviour – and thought no more about it.

But unbeknownst to me Lynsay Watson, a buddy of Wallace’s and a former cop who had been fired for gross misconduct, reported me for criminal harassment for those posts. I only found out that the police had recorded my name against a crime on the Police National Database as a result of that report when Watson applied for judicial review of my home police force’s refusal to actually prosecute me, and as an “interested party” I was provided with the papers (my writeup for the Critic last year is here).

This post picks up at that point, and runs to the end of a court hearing last Thursday, February 12th, in Manchester. Others have already spoken about what happened directly after that hearing. For now I won’t.

First, as expected, Watson’s initial application for judicial review was rejected “on the papers”, meaning without a hearing. Also as expected he appealed — as I discovered on February 5th, when my home police force’s solicitors wrote to tell me that in a week’s time there would be an in-person hearing in the Manchester Civil Justice Centre at which Watson would represent himself. I also received both Watson’s arguments and the police force’s response.

I know of many people who have been harassed online by Watson, at least half a dozen of whom have, like me, filed crime reports. Like mine, those crime reports went nowhere because the police hadn’t been able (to be honest, hadn’t tried very hard) to find him. They have arranged voluntary interviews with him by phone several times, but he never shows, and when they visit his most recent known address they are told he moved away some time ago.

It’s remarkable that with all the police’s resources and powers, Watson was eventually located only because of the diligence of private citizens. Our efforts were further complicated by there being no picture of him in circulation more recent than a couple of tabloid interviews around 20 years ago, which were probably pretty airbrushed even then. The police had been asked to issue a press release describing him as wanted for questioning, which could have included the picture on his warrant card, but refused.

So this was a priceless opportunity: a known place and time with Watson guaranteed to be present. I told some of the other people who have made crime reports against Watson, tipped off a couple of press photographers and bought a train ticket to Manchester. Meanwhile journalist Stuart Campbell, aka Wings Over Scotland, whose crime report against Watson had led to an arrest warrant, informed Greater Manchester Police.

On the day Dr Emma Hilton, the chair of Sex Matters, who is based in Manchester, and Cathy Larkman of Women’s Rights Network, a retired senior police officer, accompanied me to court. I was unwilling to attend alone — Watson has made serious threats against me and others and generally gives a strong impression of emotional dysregulation. Not knowing what he looked like made me even more worried — I was afraid that he might be in the vicinity of the court and I wouldn’t recognise him, whereas he would easily recognise me.

Outside court with Dr Emma Hilton and Cathy Larkman (picture credit: Iain Masterton)

The press photographers were already outside when we arrived, well before the hearing, and we went inside to wait after asking them to snap anyone they thought might be him. The picture at the top of this article was one of those “potentials”, taken well before the hearing started and sent directly to us by phone. When we entered the courtroom Watson was already sitting in there alone. He turned and gave the three of us a long stare as we sat down at the back, at which point we were able to be sure that the man in the picture was definitely him.

It was obviously interesting to see and hear the Mystery (trans-identifying) Man in the flesh. I would have had no idea if I had passed him in the street that he was a “trans woman”; he just looked like a man with a ponytail and a fringe. He’s lived in many parts of the UK, moving around from one police force to another, and I wouldn’t even have been able to guess what his accent might be. He turns out to speak with a soft but distinct Scottish burr (he was born in Scotland) and in a light, slightly whispery voice. I wonder whether he was deliberately speaking quietly, either to make it hard for those of us several rows back to hear what he was saying or to sound less masculine. But anyway, it was neither an obviously faked ladyvoice nor a booming baritone.

The hearing was listed to last 30 minutes — 10.30–11am — but ran almost until noon, when the following case in the same courtroom was scheduled to start. It was one of the most surreal and fascinating experiences of my life. I took notes during it, which are not a verbatim transcript (I’m a fast touch-typist, not a stenographer) but are a good-faith aide memoire.

The first half-hour or so covered nothing substantive. First the judge sought to confirm that the interested parties — me and Freda Wallace — had been informed of the hearing. One of the oddities of this case is that Watson, not my alleged “victim”, made the crime report, he said because Wallace is disabled and was too distressed by the whole thing to do it himself or to attend court. When the judge asked for information regarding the alleged disability, Watson said he wasn’t willing to say more.

Watson said he had told Wallace personally and that he had sent his papers to a Sex Matters email address, but couldn’t confirm that they had been passed to me. I nobly put up my hand and told the judge that I was the Helen Joyce in question and could confirm that I had indeed received the papers. That settled, the judge decided to accept Watson’s assurance that Wallace had received them too, and that he knew about the hearing but didn’t want to attend.

Next came the question of standing. Counsel for my home police force argued that Watson was not sufficiently associated with the incident to be able to take a judicial review of the charging decision.

Here are my notes on what he said:

There is a victim of alleged criminality – Wallace. There is a witness – Watson. There is an effort to assign ‘standing’ to another where there is no identified legal basis to do so.

Seems pretty clear to me. But I Am Not A Lawyer (neither, of course, is Watson).

Watson said… well, hard to tell really, I think that “transphobia” affects all trans people? Sorry, when I can’t follow someone’s ramblings I can’t make comprehensible notes.

Next came the question of whether what I did was sufficiently bad to have merited prosecution. Here are my notes of what the police counsel said about that (the three paragraphs are from different bits of the hearing):

It is a very high threshold. While the police accept the tweets could be of significant harm or offence to an individual, that is not the test to be applied. It’s not whether they are offensive, or even grossly offensive – it’s whether they constitute harassment. No court could conclude that those criminal offences are made out.

This is a case that is in effect doomed to fail.

This is a very challenging area for the police to attempt to police. Online discourse in this area is characterised frequently by deeply entrenched positions. Oftentimes the communications exchanged by the parties falls well below the standard of what would be hoped for in civil public discourse.

Again, I Am Not A Lawyer. Or a stenographer. But how bloody enraging is the characterisation of what I said as falling far below the level expected of civil public discourse! I think I showed quite remarkable restraint in not saying publicly what I really thought of Freda Wallace’s behaviour at the IEA event! I kept calm at this point by imagining jumping up like an actress in an unrealistic American courtroom drama and hollering something like “Oh PLEASE, you try sitting there calmly while a fat, drunk self-professed fetishist talks about his lesbian penis and penchant for fucking TERFs’ husbands!” (Staying silent was my second moment of extreme nobility, after informing the judge I had indeed been told about the hearing.)

Then it all got very unstructured. Somehow – I couldn’t follow – Watson circled back to the question of standing, arguing that he did have standing because (a) he had previously been given permission to take a judicial review against Greater Manchester Police’s decision not to prosecute Stuart Campbell for “misgendering” Brianna Ghey, a trans-identifying teenage boy who was murdered; (b) “arguably” he had less standing in that case than he did in this one — I think because of his close connection with Freda Wallace — and therefore since he had been given permission in that one he should be given permission in this one (in fact he shouldn’t have been given permission in the first one either); and (c) he had told my home police force “repeatedly” that he had authority to act on Wallace’s behalf and they “wouldn’t even engage with me to say ‘prove it’. This gave me a personal interest in the decision-making process.”

The question of whether he had standing seemed, in his mind, to be the same question as whether the police should have prosecuted me. He had managed to grasp that it would be “exceptional” for the judge to overrule a police force on a decision not to prosecute – but in his opinion this was precisely such an “exceptional” situation because of what he described as the systemic refusal of the entire police service to investigate online crimes against trans people.

A different judge (Judge Bird, who has been handling Watson’s ongoing attempts to get Stuart Campbell prosecuted) had, he claimed, previously told him that it would be “very serious” if the police service was maintaining a secret policy of not investigating reports of online crimes against trans people. He said Bird had encouraged him to go away and find evidence to support this allegation, which he said he had done. He had applied for “a number” of judicial reviews related to this national conspiracy, and had made approximately 25 or 40 crime reports — he gave both figures at different points during the hearing — to forces all over the country, which had all brushed them off, saying that they were “not interested” and that what had happened was “not a crime”.

At one point Watson spent about 15 minutes complaining that he had applied to see a letter that I and five others who have alleged harassment by him had written to the chief constables of the relevant police forces, urging them to cooperate and investigate him properly. Watson had previously demanded disclosure of this letter, and been refused. On Thursday the judge tried again and again to say that this refusal had already been upheld, and Watson had not made any renewed application relating to it and that therefore it was not relevant to this hearing. Counsel for my home force chipped in to say that the letter concerned matters under live police investigation and that it had been mentioned in the force’s original arguments against the judicial review only to illustrate that Watson’s application had not been made “in a vacuum”.

In response Watson contradicted the judge repeatedly, on occasion talking over her, and said that because the judge who had rejected the initial application for judicial review had seen the letter while he had not, he could not trust that the judge had not been biased by it. I assure you, said the judge in this hearing, that judges are well used to deciding cases on the relevant material, and the letter had been judged not relevant. But on and on he went.

The other bit of what theatre folk call “business” was when Watson suddenly said that there were police officers outside the courtroom and that he feared they were there in order to arrest him once the hearing was over. He made mention at this point of the “people” sitting at the back of the courtroom, that is, Emma, Cathy and me. (There were indeed police waiting outside; we saw them before we went in.) This, he claimed, was a breach of his Article 3 rights. Article 3 is about torture, inhumane or degrading treatment, and this is such an overreach that I can’t help wondering whether he meant Article 6, the right to a fair trial — not that being arrested for unrelated charges after a court hearing is a breach of Article 6, but it’s at least in the same ballpark. Ish.

The judge said that whether or not there were police outside, and whether or not he was arrested afterwards, was all irrelevant to this hearing (she must have been getting tired of these words by this point). The whole way through she kept trying, without much success, to get Watson to focus on the case at hand and to stop extemporising about secret police policies, undisclosed letters and other judicial-review applications and crime reports. It was pretty funny to watch, until you remember that all this was costing public money: a judge, court officials, a solicitor and counsel for my home force’s chief constable all in attendance, not to mention court time and all the preparation for this farce.

Anyway. What I took away from it all was this. First, Watson is truly convinced that “deadnaming” and “misgendering” are such serious acts that they automatically constitute criminal harassment. Second, he thinks that means any trans person has standing to complain about deadnaming or misgendering whenever it occurs and whoever is the “victim”. Third, he concludes that any police force who receives such a complaint but doesn’t proceed to prosecution is motivated by a prejudiced and unlawful determination to leave trans people entirely without police protection. (Hypothetically, I presume he also believes that, fourth, any court that tries such an allegation and doesn’t convict would be similarly motivated.)

I can see — sort of — that given this (false) starting premise, the rest (kind of) follows. And I can also see why legalistic arguments that separate out questions of standing, decision-making concerning prosecution and indeed anything else would then be beside the point. The way Watson sees it, the only relevant facts are that I, Helen Joyce, called Freda Wallace “Fred” and “he/him” and this was reported by someone, anyone, to the police: case closed.

Of course, the starting premise is false. But the substantive part of the hearing largely consisted of Watson insisting that it was true. Here’s a selection of the things he said (not direct quotes, but very close):

The impugned tweets were particularly grossly offensive in nature.

The oppressive nature of repeatedly deadnaming — I’ve been trying to get police forces to see this for around five years now.

With this issue of deadnaming and repeated misgendering we are often reaching a point where it can become so oppressive that the act itself becomes grossly offensive.

Misgendering, deadnaming — it’s worse than when they used to out gay footballers in the 70s and 80s, same kind of thing. They really didn’t care, you could read about it in the Sunday Sport, another person’s life destroyed. Now it seems repugnant and offensive.

It’s a national sport for certain people to deadname.

Ms Wallace cannot even go online without being abused by her dead name.

It all goes back to certain persons with a very high profile doing this to her.

The harms caused by deadnaming trans people are huge. You out people to friends and family who simply don’t know, to colleagues. You cause immense problems with their gender dysphoria, it’s a reminder of previous identities.

The defence barrister used words like “not even close to the threshold” — I started to shake because I find that so offensive — the idea of repeatedly misgendering on a public forum, it’s there forever — outing trans people, deadnaming her — as something that can be brushed off… you destroy lives, destroy mental health, destroy trans people who had been comfortable in their new social circle.

I’ve been trying now to get various courts to hear from trans people how we regard deadnaming — for some accidental reason, that’s one thing — but repeated deadnaming to dehumanise and harass people… there’s no challenge for police to investigate, the challenge is to find an excuse not to.

The cruellest thing is to deadname and out and humiliate by making sure [trans people] never ever have a private life.

I know from my community that most trans people have totally abandoned the digital space.

This is what has happened to trans people, friends, colleagues, it’s horrific. Free speech — I’m a great believer in free speech — but this isn’t free speech… There’s no article protection for harassing another — deadnaming is targeted harassment. There’s no public interest, just pure harassment.

(My third moment of nobility during the trial was refraining from audibly scoffing at Watson’s claim to be a “great believer in free speech”.)

Watson claimed that because of his own former name being in the public domain, he had had to go on medication for stress and depression. (Side note: the person I allegedly deadnamed was Wallace, not Watson, so whether Watson finds being deadnamed upsetting is irrelevant to whether I committed a crime. And I say allegedly because I call Wallace “Fred” only because it’s the masculine version of Freda, not because it’s his “deadname”. I don’t know and don’t care what he was called before he started claiming to be a woman.)

Watson also claimed several times that I had made demeaning and sexualised remarks about Wallace — from my notes, remarks of an “overtly sexual nature”, “crude and repugnant sexual allegations”, “aggravated sexual slurs” and “sexual innuendos”. In fact I did nothing that could possibly be described that way by anyone with even a passing acquaintance with reality.

One possibility is that Watson is thinking of things that Wallace, not I, said. During the event — which was recorded and is still available to watch on YouTube — Wallace bragged of having sex with lesbians as a “sperm-producing female” and fucking men with his “female penis in fetish clubs”. He claimed the husbands of women who campaign for single-sex spaces might support their wives in public, but “in private they fuck me”.

The other, perhaps more likely, possibility is that Watson took exception to my clearing up online speculation about the visible lump of upper-thigh fat hanging out of Wallace’s ripped fishnets, which many people who saw a photo of it thought might be a stray testicle (see below; mind your eyes). I tweeted to put them right so that this inaccuracy didn’t gain the status of established fact – but this wasn’t me making any sort of sexualised remark! It was the opposite; I was clearing up a sexualised misconception! (A fourth moment of nobility; they’re really racking up.) Truly, no good deed goes unpunished.

This wasn’t the only fantastical element of Watson’s complaint: he genuinely seemed also to think that my referring to Wallace as a man was intruding on his privacy by “outing” him. This is absurd: Wallace talks about being trans all the time and was invited to join the panel at IEA specifically because he’s trans. More fundamentally, it’s obvious to anyone with eyes or ears that he’s a man — as it is for Watson himself. Here’s another photo of him from Thursday before the hearing.

(And yet Watson is perhaps owed a scintilla of sympathy for holding the delusion that trans people must be referred to by their chosen pronouns and name. Both Wallace and he were referred to as women, Miss and she/her throughout Thursday’s hearing, and rainbow-washed police forces often speak and act like this is compulsory. I can kind of see why Watson might think the police and courts should jump to it when people like me don’t comply.)

Overall, I came away understanding that Watson regards himself as a one-“woman” crusader for men’s right to be seen as and referred to as women if that is what they wish, with refusal punished as a crime. The reason he’s constantly reporting people for “misgendering and deadnaming” and trying to judicially review forces that do not prosecute is that he regards it as his job to educate police forces and courts on what he regards as their legal responsibilities.

Police have had long enough to get to know this issue, he said at one point: they know “full well” that repeated misgendering and deadnaming are “permanent public outing of trans people”. Close to the end of the hearing he said, bathetically: “I’m looking for one court in this land to acknowledge this.”

On the train home from Manchester that afternoon, I received a call from my home police force asking whether the harassment I had reported had continued past the last date in my statement. The officer didn’t say why, but harassment “times out” after six months, meaning that if someone hasn’t been charged within six months they never will be. I was able to report that it was ongoing, and to send the officer who called screenshots of further social-media posts that continued the long-running pattern. This means my crime report about Watson is still live, and that Watson can still be prosecuted.

Judgment on whether Watson will get permission to judicially review my home police was reserved (meaning it wasn’t handed down straight away). The judge gave no indication of how long it would take.

A reader drew my attention to this interesting judgment, which was handed down before Christmas. It concerns a trans-identifying woman with a gender-recognition certificate (FZ), who is married to a woman (MZ) who has had two children with donor sperm since the couple got together. The first child was born before they married and the second after. The couple regard FZ as the children’s father and argued that she should be registered as such on the second child’s birth certificate.

I’m not going to go through the judgment offering legal commentary — I’m not qualified. What interests me is the way the case brings two sociolegal fictions, one time-honoured and the other recent, into a fascinating collision.

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A vivid example was provided last Friday when a young woman went into the toilet at the Hippodrome casino in central London and saw two cross-dressing men inside. She left, asked a security guard to remove them and were told that they had the right to use the toilets because they were “dressed as women”. So she gathered some friends and they returned and challenged the men themselves.

Much of the altercation was videoed; security turned up and in the end the men left voluntarily. There’s a writeup in the Daily Mail, and one of the women involved talked about it to GB News. (As it happens, I was at the same event as the young women (the Hippodrome lets out private rooms), but I had left before it all kicked off. )

I’ve spent some time in the past couple of days looking at hostile responses on social media. Most posters sympathise with them and think they did a great job of standing up for themselves — as do I. But I always wonder how these things come across to people who either disagree with my position or aren’t sure what to think.

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jealous, faithless

ramblings of a gen z heretic

By Serena Worley

Here’s the quote:

“It is hard to remember that there are cases that we never hear about (largely because we never hear about them), but it is important to remember that this social phenomenon has had far more victims than we can ever know.”

The reason that it resonated with me is the double consciousness experienced by all of us who stick our heads above the parapet on this topic. Publicly, it seems like there are very few victims of gender-related cancel culture — very few stories of ostracism, sacking and the like caused by refusal to play along. But privately we hear from these victims all the time. Most don’t share their stories openly, whether because they are too embarrassed or traumatised, because they fear even worse happening if they do or because they think going public will cause them problems in their future lives.

This disconnect between private and public knowledge is unsettling, and one of the reasons for making these stories public is to help reconcile the two. So in that spirit, I’m sharing another such story, less dramatic perhaps but at least as shocking, in that it involved the full might of an institution deployed in an attempt to destroy a young woman’s life. Thankfully, she was able to fight back and come out relatively unscathed, but in such cases the process is the punishment.

I met the young woman in question a while back, when she came up to talk to me after an event at which I spoke. Some time later she emailed to say that her university had just notified her that she was being investigated for having breached several of its policies, including those governing student misconduct and equal opportunity. She wanted to know if I would write a letter in support of her that she could add to her written response, which I did. (So did several other campaigners against gender ideology and for women’s rights.)

Her crime? Writing a rebuttal to an article in a student magazine about how TERFs are not just wrong but bigoted. The magazine had published her response, someone had complained and now she was required to provide a written response to the allegations and then attend a misconduct hearing. If the allegations were upheld she risked expulsion.

Fortunately, she is an intelligent and articulate young woman with a strong support system. She was able to write a compelling rebuttal of the accusations and express herself convincingly in the hearing, with the result that the accusations were dismissed in their entirety.

But that best-case outcome is still shocking. A student who did nothing but respond to a (badly argued and written) article in a student publication was put through a terrifying ordeal that can, without exaggeration, be compared to being charged with a crime of which she was totally innocent, on the basis of an anonymous accusation. Okay, she wasn’t going to end up with a criminal record or in jail – but being expelled from university is a serious penalty for a young person, with potentially life-changing consequences. And the fear and emotional strain she was put through will take quite some time to recover from.

Some of the victims aren’t as well-placed as “Anna” (not her real name) to defend themselves. They either end up sanctioned or – and this is probably more likely – apologise, retract and go dark. Even those who, like her, succeed in rebutting the allegations rarely want to talk about what happened publicly for fear that doing so will tarnish their reputation and complicate future job-hunting. As Serena says in her post, this sort of thing is happening all over the place. But we rarely get to hear about it.

With this young woman’s permission, I’m sharing my letter of support, with her name changed and a few minor details redacted.

I met Anna at an event at which I was speaking on the enormously important topic of the medicalisation of childhood gender distress. She impressed me as a compassionate, thoughtful and brave young woman whose own experience of gender distress and mental-health struggles had given her a wisdom and insight rare in someone so young, and a determination to use that painful experience to help other young women struggling to find their way in our rapidly changing society that would be rare at any age.

As Anna told me when we talked, her worldview has been shaped by her struggles to accept the unalterable fact of her femaleness while rejecting the stereotypes associated with her sex. This is a task that complicates adolescence for many intelligent, sensitive, non-conforming young women, not least because our society puts extra obstacles in their way while they try to do so.

During the 20th century women’s status in many countries, including my home country of Ireland, improved beyond all recognition. Women gained the right to vote, own property, gain a full education, join the professions, leave unhappy marriages and control their own fertility.

But no sooner had we achieved substantive equality under the law than a new — and I would argue extremely harmful — ideology emerged. It overturned the progressive and liberatory message that being female was a neutral but unchangeable aspect of human biology, and that nowadays girls and women can do anything because we have finally recognised that the norms and strictures imposed on the female sex were discriminatory, harmful and senseless. In its place it reified those norms and strictures by turning them into the definition of what it is to be a girl or woman. A girl or woman is now a human being who “identifies with” feminine stereotypes; a person born female who finds those stereotypes unappealing is invited to identify out of her sex. If she declines to do so, she is assumed to “identify” with, or as, the sort of person who fits those stereotypes.

This novel and regressive world view is the opposite of progressive and liberatory! It is harmful for any adolescent, but most especially an adolescent like Anna, who not only wanted, naturally enough, to grow up to be a full, rounded human being but also had to negotiate the emergence of same-sex sexual orientation. I also have a gay child — a son who is now a young adult — and I am well aware of how, even with the most supportive parents and friends, teenagers who are realising that in this respect they are unlike their friends pick up homophobic messages from the society around them, even if they are not overt in the way they were when I was a teenager in the 1980s. I am full of admiration for the young gay adults who navigate this extra complication in their teens and come out stronger, kinder and more insightful, as both my son and Anna and her girlfriend did.

I have read both the original article to which Anna was responding, and Anna’s own article. The first is intellectually superficial: full of unevidenced smears by association, circular reasoning and question-begging. It would require not one but several articles to fully debunk it. However I fully support the author’s right to write it. Young people deserve grace as they are learning and navigating conflicting theories and visions of the world.

Anna’s article, by contrast, is logically coherent and supplies the evidence for all its claims. Her compassion and joyful vision of a world in which all humans, both male and female, can be free to flourish without the impositions of traditional notions of masculinity and femininity shines through in every word. It is clearly the product of profound thinking as well as painful but ultimately transformative personal experience.

In other words, I am not merely defending Anna’s article on the grounds of free speech and academic freedom. I am defending it as precisely the sort of brave, rigorous and insightful evidenced engagement with big, scary and important subjects that all of us, but most especially academics, should be actively fostering in our youth.

I’m proud to know Anna. Her university should be proud that she is among its student body and, once she graduates, proud to have her among its alumni.

In this post I’m going to pick two particularly terrible aspects, and add some reflections on both judgments and what I think may and what I think (hope) may follow once appeals have been heard and all of this has shaken out.

Maria Kelly (Photo credit: Iain Masterton. Used with permission)

The maddest thing in Kelly (I think, at least, and against stiff competition) is that the judgment flatly rejects Kelly’s claim that she doesn’t see trans-identifying men as women. Here’s what it says:

“The claimant is aware that trans women believe their gender identity is at variance to their sex whereas non-trans men (including transvestites) do not.

“The claimant is aware that trans women often undergo a process for the purpose of reassigning their gender identity (or their belief in it) which may entail medical advice, hormonal treatment, and/or endeavouring to live permanently as a female including modifying their appearance and presentation. The claimant is aware that a transvestite i.e. crossdresser does not undergo such a process and is merely engaged in a temporary modification of their appearance.

“It is not therefore accepted that the claimant believes that trans women are indistinguishable from men in practice.”

Reading this, I boggle. It’s as if the tribunal had told an atheist that whatever she claimed, she really did believe that Christ died for our sins and rose again. And if I understand correctly, this is a finding of fact! If that’s right Kelly’s counsel will either have to argue in her appeal that this finding is so perverse it has to be overturned (it certainly seems so to me, though I am not a lawyer) or start her appeal from the position that she really does accept that “trans women” are a distinct group of male people whom she does in fact distinguish from other men.

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In this post I’ll focus on the Peggie judgment, and return to the Kelly one in the next.

Sandie Peggie with her solicitor, Margaret Gribbon (photo credit: Nicole Jones)

Surely the most extraordinary thing about it was that it contained at least three direct quotes purporting to be from precedent-setting legal cases that were either misquoted or entirely made up. One purported to be from my colleague Maya Forstater’s appeal:

In Forstater v CDG Europe and others UKEAT/0105/20 the Employment Appeal Tribunal had emphasised that:

“It is important to bear in mind that the [Equality Act 2010] does not create a hierarchy of protected characteristics.”

Maya knows her ruling inside-out (she has an extraordinary memory for laws and judgments and can quote chunks verbatim), and as soon as she read this she was certain it didn’t feature. And sure enough, it’s pure invention. The tribunal has issued a correction – but one that raises more questions than it answers.

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If you haven’t already seen it — and if your blood pressure can take it — it’s here.

I had wondered whether Webberley could possibly believe the nonsense she talks — whether, in other words, she is deluded, stupid or saying things she knows not to be true. What I have concluded after the event (an hour of my life I won’t get back) is that none of these properly describe her. What she is is a bullshitter, in the sense proposed by American philosopher Harry Frankfurt, in his book “On Bullshit”, published in 2005.

What distinguishes liars from bullshitters, Frankfurt said, was that liars knowingly seek to convince others of a falsehood, whereas bullshitters don’t care and may not even know whether what they say is true or false. The bullshitter’s speech is more profoundly instrumental — and cynical — than the speech of the liar, who seeks to convince you of the truth of a falsehood. That speech isn’t intended to have any relationship with the truth, either positive or negative. Facts are neither here nor there.

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It’s a few months since a PR for Helen Webberley got in touch to say that she would like to do an event with me. If you have had the immense good fortune not to have come across Webberley before, she’s the founder of an online puberty-blockers and hormones mill called GenderGP; she and her husband faced fitness-to-practice hearings after other, less extreme gender clinicians complained about their slapdash and extreme prescribing practices; he lost his licence to practise; she kept hers upon appeal but has since let it lapse. Now GenderGP, which is based in Singapore but blocked by its government from prescribing to locals, offers online consultations and other services like voice training, and arranges for others to fill those prescriptions. I won’t say more here about what I think about this business model, but may return to it down the line.

I honestly thought the PR contact was a setup: that the assumption was that I would refuse and Webberley could then crow that for all that I insisted on the importance of free speech and open debate, when given the chance to go head to head with someone who disagreed with me, I backed down. Instead conversations about where and when continued. After a few delays it’s ended up happening this evening.

Times Radio were keen to host it, and it’s being broadcast live. The show will run for an hour, hosted by Jo Coburn, including intro and ad break. You can watch live on the Times Radio YouTube channel.

It seems that Webberley is doing the publicity rounds, presumably because she has just announced that GenderGP is now active in America. A debate with Julie Bindel on a podcast called the Hodge-Cast was recorded last weekend; it’s airing this evening at 6pm UK time on the show’s YouTube channel (the timing is a coincidence — neither the host nor Julie knew about my interview having been booked to go live that evening). Webberley also went on GB News, interviewed by Ben Leo — the interview has rightly gone viral after an impressive performance by Ben. His parting description of Webberley as “borderline evil” is all the more effective for being understated.

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With speakers and organisers for the CASC summit

Why do gender clinicians feel like they’re good people, and that what they are doing is right, even though when you look at it objectively, all they’re doing is harm? It’s because what’s called gender medicine is part of a society-wide trend that sees any attempt to classify people objectively as coercive, and sees self-definition as the highest good. You could call this hyper-liberalism, or hyper-individualism, and it’s the idea that each person has a true self, and knows that true self, and self-knowledge about your true self by definition cannot be wrong.

Within this worldview notions of a shared human nature and the common good are meaningful only in something like the way Judith Butler thought gender was: they exist only because they have been performed repeatedly. To live a good life, to be an admirable person, to be a net positive for the world, to help rather than hurt others… the old-fashioned views on these things are the way they are for no reason, just empty tradition. And nowadays we are wiser; we understand that being good, or admirable, or a positive for the world is declaratory, not objective: for the individual to choose and not for others to judge. And the way you choose is to look within yourself to see what kind of person you are, and then express that person outwardly.

I say this is hyper-liberalism because it’s out on the far side past liberal of the conservative-liberal spectrum. For conservatives, there is such a thing as a shared human nature, and that’s why we’re able to have a concept of the common good. The point of society is to try to give life to shared ideals, and that will involve societal impositions and restraints on individuals. Liberals emphasise a different part of what it means to be a good, happy and flourishing individual — the bit that’s about freedom to make our own decisions and to choose for ourselves what it means to live the “good life”.

So you’ve got two different ideals: living according to shared values that spring from our shared humanity, and being “in tune with yourself”. A so-called liberal democracy is an attempt to combine and balance the two ideals, which both have a lot to offer. Our universal human rights must be based on some shared understanding of what it is to be human, and to flourish, but many of those human rights are rights to make our own choices and express ourselves as we wish, albeit constrained by other people’s rights, and more generally by the compromises required to share a society with others.

And what’s happening is that the liberal side of this balance has been pushed to an extreme, to the position that each person has a true self that they get to choose or discover by introspection. Inclusion, meaning the lack of external constraints based on objective definitions, is automatically good. And discrimination, in its original neutral meaning of noticing and when necessary acting on differences, is automatically bad.

From this point of view, communal ideas of “shared human nature” look coercive, and it’s coercive to label or categorise. Any time a person says they are something, and other people or the authorities don’t agree, those other people and the authorities are not only wrong but evil, in that they are harming individuals and forcing them to live inauthentically. The only thing you are an authority on is yourself, and you’re being coercive and bigoted telling other people anything about them.

By the by, this idea that official classification is state coercion because the category you’re classed in it may not match your own self-conception explains why the expressions “assigned at birth” or even “coercively assigned at birth” have been appropriated from an abusive, obsolete treatment protocol for babies with ambiguous or injured genitalia. And it’s why “self-ID” seems like such a no-brainer: linguistically, it taps into the highest ideal of this hyper-individualist way of thinking, namely self-definition.

The direction of travel in gender clinics is to abandon all pretence that they are still connected with any concern for healthy functioning. You see this in the recent trend for them to say that what they are offering is to help patients along their “gender journey” and enable them to pursue their “embodiment goals”. You work out your gender, you decide what physical form best expresses that gender — and there are no rules or norms, so it’s up to you — and then you go to people who can prescribe you drugs or offer you surgeries that will give you that physical form. (Or at least that they claim will give you that physical form; this is all divorced from physiological reality. It’s as if we’re Mr and Mrs Potato Heads, able to attach, detach, re-attach functioning body parts at will.)

Because self-definition is the highest, indeed only, good, doing this to yourself is extremely moral, and helping other people to do it to themselves is moral too. And regret is a moot point — it’s what you want in the moment that matters; if you change your mind in future that’s all good, you are just at a different point in your gender journey. You can’t go back to the person who facilitated you in cutting off healthy body parts and blame them: it was your call, they were just affirming you. This isn’t even even “buyer beware”, it’s a total abdication of not just responsibility but of even the bare acknowledgement that it’s possible to be harmed by pursuing goals you chose for yourself.

One of the many contradictions and inconsistencies of gender-identity ideology is that it has arisen within, and co-opts the language of, the liberal human-rights framework, even though that framework is includes objective tests for balancing rights, and for when other considerations, such as sound administration, are allowed to constrain someone’s rights. You sometimes hear people say “rights aren’t pie”, but that’s nonsense, rights often are pie. What you give to one person is often necessarily taken from another, and sometimes one person’s right to something hinders other people’s right to something else. That understanding is built into the framework.

Somehow the idea has arisen that to have your gender affirmed is a human right — and yet it’s impossible for it to be accommodated within this framework. We aren’t all protagonists surrounded by non-player characters; we’re each other’s fellow players and audiences. And certain performances — say, a man putting on the “I’m a woman” play by competing in a women’s sporting event — makes some other plays — in this case all the women who want to put on the “ fair competition and may the best woman win” play — impossible to perform.

More broadly, hyper-individualism makes any sort of balancing exercise based on objective considerations impossible.

Take privacy and free speech. Both are qualified rights within the human-rights framework: we may override one person’s privacy if it unreasonably constrains another person’s free speech, and vice versa. It’s a framework within which, to quote the American jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Your right to swing your fist ends where my nose begins.”

But when a person’s privacy is to do with what they conceive of as their identity, the only acceptable position within this new way of thinking is to affirm that identity. And if ensuring that people do that means draconian limitations on their free speech, that’s too bad. As for one person’s identity imposing on other people’s privacy, that is understood to be an impossibility, because “people are who they say they are”. The transwoman stripping off in the women’s changing-room is a woman, and no more an imposition on the other occupants’ privacy than any other woman stripping off would be. And if that’s not how it looks to some women, well, they are siding with the state that coercively assigned that poor transwoman male at birth, and are therefore evil and don’t deserve any rights.

This shift doesn’t merely destroy human rights, it harnesses the machinery of human-rights law to work against human rights. Silencing other people on a perfectly obvious fact that everyone can see — that someone is a man or a woman — now has the force of a human right behind it, namely privacy, when in fact it’s a rights violation — a serious infringement of other people’s freedom of speech.

Similarly, self-ID means that a man stripping off in front of naked women in a supposedly women-only space, and watching them strip off in front of him in that space, is doing something right and proper if he identifies as a woman. Those women are validating his identity, and he has the right to have his identity validated and they don’t have the right to withhold that validation.

Again, this is not just a destruction of human rights, it’s a full reversal. And it’s not just any old human-rights violation, it’s state-sanctioned sex crime — voyeurism and indecent exposure — and a violation of Article 5 of the UN Declaration on Human Rights, the right not to suffer torture, inhuman or degrading treatment, which is an absolute right, not a qualified one. The European Court of Human Rights has ruled that being forced to undress in front of someone of the opposite sex violates this article.

Hyper-individualism is also hyper-subjectivity. If you can never take the measure of a man, you can’t set objective standards or criteria, and you can’t categorise. If you want to make generalisations, to collate, group and study people’s characteristics and experiences, these can only be under headings like: “People who think of themselves as belonging to a certain category, for which I can give no objective definition, say they experienced things they understood as instances of a certain sort of experience, for which I can also give no objective definition.”

You can’t say: male people commit most violent crimes, or most rape victims are female, or nearly everyone who works as a firefighter is male, or every human being who has ever got pregnant is female. You have no test of the “reasonable person”. All boundaries dissolve. That’s what queer theory is all about: making it impossible to say that anything is different or separate from anything else. You can’t say things are objectively good or bad — except that it’s definitely bad to disagree with someone’s self-categorisation. This makes it impossible to do sound scientific research.

This has already happened in fields where sex is a key explanatory variable. Professor Alice Sullivan, a sociologist and statistician at University College London, was commissioned by the previous Conservative government in the UK to carry out an independent review of data, statistics and research on sex and gender, and the final report came out this year. It’s a great piece of work, and what she and her team concluded was that the collection of accurate data on sex was (a) crucial for effective policymaking across a wide range of fields, from health and justice to education and the economy, and (b) had been seriously hampered by a widespread tendency to ask self-ID questions, at first just treating the two sexes as opt-in categories and then more recently by adding non-binary or “another gender”.

She recommended that data on sex should be gathered as the default in all government data-collection exercises, and that “sex” should mean sex — natal sex, or sex at birth, or whatever you want to call it. The current Labour government has welcomed the review, but so far shown little sign of actually taking the recommendations on board.

To look at our theme here today, of healthcare, hyper-subjectivity breaks everything there too. It’s not possible to do research or to offer treatment if you don’t have an idea of what is a better state to be in, and what is a worse state to be in, what causes those two states and how to distinguish between them. What causes pain, and that it’s better not to be in pain. What it looks like for wounds to heal well or badly, and that it’s better for them to heal well. That it’s better to be mobile and continent than immobile and incontinent. That it’s better to have your limbs and organs and physiological systems functioning properly than not.

We don’t generally hear: What is pain but a social construct? Or: it’s stigmatising to incontinent persons to suggest that it would be better not to have stress incontinence as a result of giving birth. But we absolutely do hear that it’s cisheteronormative to worry about destroying children’s future adult reproductive and sexual function. And it’s true that to say that this is wrong you have to take a normative position — that it is better, all else equal, to preserve a child’s capacity to have a fully satisfying sex life when they grow up, and to be able to have children, than not to do so

The protagonists of “gender affirming care” have lost sight of our shared human nature, they’ve forgotten that we are a particular type of animal. They think that we are entirely self-made, but we’re not. I’m sure some people in the audience think that we have a God-given nature; I don’t. I think we have an evolution-given nature. But anyway, the central point is: we are a particular type of creature.

There’s a quote I often think of from the science-fiction writer William Gibson: “the future is here, it is just unevenly distributed.” Well, if the future is one in which the patient is the sole authority and there is no shared understanding of what healthy function means, then the future is here in gender clinics. If we don’t actively push back against this sort of radical subjectivity then I’m afraid the gender clinics will be not merely aberrations but outriders.

To come back to the present, we have another of those catastrophic and in my opinion tactically deliberate misunderstandings between people inside the gender ritual and people outside it. Inside it, the shared understanding is that no physical state is inherently any better than any other, to think otherwise is bigotry and the job of clinicians is to validate the identities of gender consumers and enable them to pursue “embodiment goals”. What they mean by lifesaving care is that life isn’t worth living unless you get to choose who you are, and to force everyone else to play along — or maybe that by refusing to affirm you people are killing the real you, the claimed identity, which only exists if people affirm it. What those outside the gender ritual understand when they hear “gender care is lifesaving care” is that “trans kids” are suffering so greatly that if you don’t perform physical interventions that they do understand are extremely damaging, those children will literally kill themselves.

Gender ideology sits within a vision of education as being about teaching children to understand their positionalities: where they sit in an identitarian framework made up of oppressed/oppressor pairs. The idea is that once a child has worked out “who they are” in this sense — it’s all about binary oppositions: white/ racialised; cis/ trans; hetero/ queer; neurotypical/ neurodivergent; coloniser/ colonised and so on — then the child will become liberated.

It’s a really simplistic theory: oppressor bad / oppressed good. And it’s static, nothing developmental about it at all. Your characteristics are fixed, so there’s no way to change who you are, you’re born either permanently oppressed or permanently an oppressor.

This vision is inimical to everything we understand about how to help children to grow up to be happy, admirable citizens. There’s no explanation of how understanding the world and yourself in this rigid, unchanging way is supposed to liberate you. It’s unclear how thinking about yourself in this way is meant to make you happy or well. And moreover, everyone has to be a permanent activist — “doing the work”. No time for the things we know actually make people happy, such as being good parents, children, siblings, neighbours, employers, employees and so on, and doing good work in the world.

I said that within this ideology your characteristics are fixed — well, one of them isn’t really, because it’s invented, namely your gender identity. Having a special gender identity, which is just a matter of declaration, remember, makes you a victim, oppressed by “cis” people, and if people refuse to validate you they are hurting you. And since oppressors are bad and oppressed people are good, it’s hardly surprising that so many young people are professing special gender identities. It’s more than just wanting to be special or different, it’s wanting to be praiseworthy, to be good.

This whole belief system is pernicious, but the gender bit is the worst, because it’s so destabilising. I don’t approve of telling people that their race or some other personal characteristic makes them good or bad, but at least those characteristics do actually exist in an objective sense, which gender identity doesn’t.

It’s hard to imagine anything more confusing to tell children than that they have to look inwards to work out something as fundamental as whether they are boys or girls, and that they are do so by comparing themselves to regressive gender stereotypes, but also, by the way, your gender identity absolutely isn’t about performing those regressive stereotypes, it’s an inner feeling, there’s no right or wrong way to be a boy or girl but it’s vital that you work out which you are...

And we’re not doing this about something trivial, we’re doing it about the biggest objective, systemic group difference among human beings. In evolutionary terms, the distinction between male and female is really meaningful. It has all sorts of consequences for the individual. Telling kids that it’s entirely subjective and up to them to work out which they are seems as unwise as telling them that breathing air or water is on a spectrum and that the only test is what they think and feel about how their respiratory system works. And that nobody else can tell them; there is no test, there are no criteria for where they are on the “breathe air to breathe water” spectrum: they will just know.

Replacing sex by gender identity within a complex system is the equivalent of introducing a false equation into the interlinked system that is mathematics. And when a lie is embedded in a system, over time it propagates throughout that system, and then everyone working within it has to try to protect the lie by staying well away from it. It’s worse than a loophole, which over time tends to get bigger. It’s a loophole you have to avert your eyes from and avoid mentioning.

I’ll give you a stark example. Sonia Appleby was the safeguarding lead at the GIDS clinic at the Tavistock Hospital in London. Various of her colleagues brought concerns to her about the high number of children being referred to the Tavistock, including their worries about the high number of children being referred to GIDS, and “a worry that some young children are being actively encouraged to be transgender without effective scrutiny of their circumstances”. She reported those concerns to her line manager.

At some point during the ensuing discussions she said how important it was that concerns were taken seriously and not shut down, and that if the clinic wasn’t careful, a “Jimmy Savile type situation” could arise. In case this man’s notoriety hasn’t made it this far, he was a TV presenter and charity fundraiser and absolutely prolific child abuser. After he died in 2011 it all started to come out, and you will probably not be surprised to hear that loads of people had known perfectly well what he was up to, or should have known, but ignored warning signs and penalised anyone who tried to whistle-blow.

One of Sonya’s jobs at the Tavistock was training staff in child safeguarding, and she routinely included a reference to Savile. In his charity work he was in and out of hospitals all the time, committing prolific sex offences against children under the noses of health-care staff. Her point was that it’s everyone’s responsibility to be vigilant and to speak up about any concerns, and that not just people but institutions can be groomed and be complicit. And she said that explicitly when she brought the safeguarding concerns within GIDS to managers’ attention — she straight away clarified that she didn’t mean there was child abuse, but rather an institution turning a blind eye to what was in front of them.

Even so one her colleagues took great offence at the idea that he might be considered as at risk of being complicit in child abuse, and he made a complaint. A letter was put on Sonia’s file for supposedly unprofessional and improper behaviour. This despite the fact that it’s literally the job of safeguarding leads to make this sort of point, and to train people to suppress this reflexive response of indignation at the idea that they might unwittingly be acting in a way that opens children to harm. After Savile died there were official inquiries and public apologies and the usual guff about “lessons must be learned”. Well, it turns out that the lesson of Jimmy Savile is: don’t mention Jimmy Savile.

There was this central lie: that children have gender identities, and that it’s a morally praiseworthy thing to mess with children’s healthy bodies to affirm those gender identities. And maintaining that lie means not looking directly at it, or at anything close to it. But everything in gender-affirming gender clinics is close to that lie. So to work within them you have to turn a blind eye to everything they are doing: to the fact that they are harming kids, not helping them. Their entire purpose endangers children, so of course child safeguarding of all sorts flies out the door.

I’ll publish the third part of this talk in another couple of days.

With the speakers and organising committee

Imagine that we’re here to talk about some other medical specialty. It’s not very realistic, because in no other area of medicine would I, a non-medic, be here, giving a keynote – and that’s not to say anything particularly about the specific position I take on gender medicine, because the conferences run by organisations that take the diametrically opposite position to me on gender medicine also have a lot of non-medics speaking at them. WPATH and its regional variants such as EPATH have been led by people who aren’t medics at all — they’re just people who identify as trans — and anyone can join, all you have to do is pay a fee. People like family therapists join because it makes them look like they have some sort of expertise in gender distress. And as well as specialist sessions in advances in surgical techniques and the like, those organisations’ conferences have sessions about topics like “social media creations by transgender and gender-diverse individuals” and “experiences of group voice training in transgender and gender-diverse people”.

But anyway, suppose that this was a conference on a different area of medicine. Everyone present would share a broad understanding of the following:

• What it means for the specific body part or system they’re considering to function properly — what it is to have a healthy immune system, or circulatory system, or hip joint or whatever.

• What sorts of things can go wrong with that body part or system — over or underactive immune system; irregular heartbeat; pain and stiffness on using the joint, that kind of thing — and what the symptoms would be.

• How to carry out a differential diagnosis to distinguish the specific thing that has gone wrong — we don’t talk about “fever” or “chest pain” as specialties, because those can be caused by lots of different conditions, and care has to be taken to work out what is causing any particular patients’ symptoms.

• Why things go wrong — post-viral syndrome; narrowing of the arteries; deterioration of the cushioning within the hip joint, whatever.

• What can be done to return the body part or system to healthy functioning, entirely or partly.

• If that isn’t possible, what can be done to ameliorate the symptoms — that is, to mitigate or control the harms done, and note that that means having an idea of what it means to feel better or worse — there are value judgments here.

• The likelihood of successful intervention, and how successful.

• The negative effects of the treatment if any — and there usually are negative effects.

I admit that there is less agreement on psychological diagnoses than on physical diagnoses, and on what causes mental illness compared with what causes physical illness. But there is still a pretty solid shared understanding of what it means to be functioning well.

The first parts of this framework would not be part of the conference schedule, because they’re all foundational. They’re fundamental to the meaning of health and health care, and of the best understanding in a particular field. What there would be is the later parts — insights into changing treatment protocols; new operation techniques or drug regimens; evidence about outcomes, downsides and so on. All the things that come from churning through the machinery of science-based or evidence-based medicine: case studies, prospective and longitudinal studies, double-blinded randomised controlled trials and systematic evidence reviews.

It’s easy to forget that this machinery can only crank into operation because we start with a shared understanding of what it is to be healthy. Without that you can’t even start to think about what can go wrong because you don’t know what “wrong” is. And you can’t come up with hypotheses for why and how it went wrong. And you’ve no hope of generating plausible ideas about treatment.

I think you can see where I’m going with this: gender medicine isn’t medicine, because nobody knows what it is to have a healthily functioning gender. I suppose someone working in the field would say that it’s “not suffering from gender dysphoria”, but that’s just a fancy way of saying “not suffering distress about something undefined” — and note too that people in the field insist that there is nothing wrong with being trans, it’s a natural variant, which is odd when the way they think people end up deciding that they are trans is generally that they suffer distress about this undefined thing called gender. And without knowing what it is to have a healthy gender, or gender identity, it’s not possible to say what it means to have a malfunctioning one, what might have caused that, and how it can be treated.

Saying someone has gender dysphoria is like saying their humours are out of balance. That was the ancient Greek theory for what made people well or unwell, which lasted until the Middle Ages — the four humours were blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. The treatments were things like bloodletting and purging: they were junk because the theory was junk. It’s the same with gender medicine. The treatments offered — puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, chest and genital surgeries and also things like voice training — are like bloodletting and purging. There isn’t any reason to think they would work.

You could do scientific research on the four humours, if you wanted. You could propose hypotheses, set up trials, generate findings and so on. And you’d generate data, and hypotheses for future research. But this would be falling into the trap that Harriet Hall, a doctor who died in 2023 who was a proponent of rationalist medicine and opponent of quackery, called Tooth Fairy Science. It’s like you decided that there was a Tooth Fairy, and it would be good to work out how to maximise the amount of money she left.

Hall wrote:

“You can study whether leaving the tooth in a baggie generates more Tooth Fairy money than leaving it wrapped in Kleenex. You can study the average money left for the first tooth versus the last tooth. You can correlate Tooth Fairy proceeds with parental income. You can get reliable data that are reproducible, consistent, and statistically significant. You think you have learned something about the Tooth Fairy. But you haven’t. Your data has another explanation, parental behavior, that you haven’t even considered. You have deceived yourself by trying to do research on something that doesn’t exist.”

All this is to say that criticisms of gender medicine generally start too far downstream. It’s true what the critics say: that there are no good studies showing positive outcomes for any of the interventions, and there is no evidence that puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones “save lives”. But there’s something prior to that, which is that there is no reason to think the sorts of things done in gender clinics even might work. The whole thing is based on an invention, just as humours were.

When we start our criticisms with the paucity of evidence we give the gender doctors too much credit. The burden of proof lies with them, not us. They should have to start by saying what is wrong with someone who is experiencing distress to do with their gender, and why the sorts of treatments they offer might work.

Even if every finding of the critics is negative — and it really does tend to be — by taking it all seriously we’re paying it a compliment it doesn’t deserve. Because we’re implicitly accepting that the sorts of things they’re doing might work, and as with the Tooth Fairy, there are endless things they might try: different hormone treatments, different genital surgeries, different timings, all the add-ons like voice training, facial feminisation surgery and so on. They won’t run out of hypotheses to test, but there’s no reason to do any of it in the first place.

One of the reasons we don’t see that gender medicine is Tooth Fairy Science is that it’s such a big claim. It’s hard to accept that an entire field of medicine simply shouldn’t exist. Medical scandals aren’t generally like this. They’re things like the pelvic mesh scandal, in which a lot of women were severely injured by having a synthetic mesh implanted to treat pelvic organ prolapse. You can totally see why someone might think this treatment would work. The scandal isn’t that it was hypothesised or tested, it’s that it wasn’t properly tested and women whose condition was made worse were ignored so the practice went on too long.

Most people quite naturally presume that gender doctors know what they’re about in the same way that cardiologists or immunologists do, because why wouldn’t ordinary people think that? Gender doctors are credentialled, they’ve got research journals and clinics and learned societies and all. So most people, even if they give credence to some criticisms of gender medicine, simply think the field has “gone too far” in a way that we’re pretty familiar with from other fields of medicine. That gender clinicians have just been incautious.

And many of the people who see up close how badly wrong it has gone have a narrow focus: someone they love has got caught up in it and very naturally they become hyper-focused on what they can try to say to that person to get through to them. They want to know what the evidence is regarding specific interventions, because it’s no longer any use to them to say it shouldn’t be happening at all.

Another reason we don’t see the emptiness of gender medicine is that gender clinics are doing a damn good imitation of medicine. Judith Butler famously said gender was an “imitation for which there is no original” – that it’s meaningful only because we do it over and over again. Well, the people working in gender medicine are performing the rituals of medicine: making appointments, doing consultations, coming up with diagnoses, writing prescriptions, doing blood tests, referring patients to other specialists like surgeons and endocrinologists, and making claims about outcomes and efficacy. When they interact with funding bodies, insurers and governments they talk as if what they are doing is medicine.

But the rituals are empty, in the same way that Butler claimed gender rituals are empty. The expression “gender dysphoria” functions as nothing more than a placeholder to make sentences that look similar in form to the kinds of sentences you might utter about angina, say, or multiple sclerosis, or schizophrenia, but because the expression is meaningless the sentences are meaningless.

In fact gender medicine is purely performative – which should delight queer theorists, since they love performativity. And the theme of the performance is the hyper-liberal, or hyper-individualist, claim that each person has a true self and knows that true self, and when they give expression to that true self they by definition cannot be wrong because the true self is the declaration. The purpose of gender medicine is to give an appearance of solidity to a specific sort of declaration of one’s true self — to your gender identity. What the clinics are selling is identity validation.

If you think that this is the sort of thing a gender identity is — a thing that the individual in question can utter into being by stating it — then it’s not just gender clinics that have this purpose. It’s everything that they would call “gendered” and the rest of us would call single-sex. To them, the reason for having women-only or men-only spaces, services or sports is so feminine people and masculine people can perform their femininity and masculinity respectively.

Actually that’s not quite right, because there isn’t any requirement to perform your gender, just to state it. Nothing further than the statement is required of the person making it: it’s other people who have to do the work by believing that statement — that is, by “affirming” that gender. The expression “gender self-identification” is a misnomer — it’s not something you have to do, beyond proclamation, it’s a demand that other people affirm you as being the gender you state yourself to be. Opening the door marked F or M is a way of declaring your gender identity.

There’s no place for other people’s judgment, indeed no role at all for other people except as supporting actors or appreciative audience. No room for them to say they don’t fancy joining in the performance, or to be a critic and say it’s not a very good performance. They’re not allowed to say: “OK, you say you’re a woman, that you’re living as a woman or have a female gender identity, but you don’t seem very female to me.”

A woman can do the most obviously unmasculine thing possible, namely get pregnant, and still be “living as a man” as long as she says she’s a man. A man can do the most obviously unfeminine things possible, namely impregnate or rape a woman, and he’s still “living as a woman” as long as he says he’s a woman. Because “men can get pregnant” and “women can rape too”.

It’s a bait and switch. They replace the physical reality of biological sex with something called gender or gender identity, which they don’t define. People who aren’t au fait with what’s going on think this is something defined. Generally they think it’s something very sexist, like “women are the kinds of people who do feminine things.” But at least that’s a little bit objective. Instead it’s just a man saying “I’m a woman.” There’s no there there.

To drive this home, think about what it means to be gay or straight — to have an exclusive, or at least nearly exclusive, interest in sleeping with people of one sex or the other. But if a man told you he was gay and you knew that he was married to a woman, and you had known him for a long time and he had only ever had girlfriends and ever boyfriends, you would feel entitled to think he was being untruthful or at least inaccurate.

Now suppose we changed the definition of being a gay man to “performing gayness” — the equivalent of “living as a woman”. You’d end up with a definition something like “loves Kylie and musical theatre, works as a ballet dancer or hairdresser” (insert your favourite stereotypes here). There is some truth to the stereotypes, that is why they exist — but my point is that at least they are still objective. Even by this definition it would be possible to say of someone that they weren’t gay, even if they claimed to be.

But what is happening with gender goes one step further. There’s nothing objective left, not even the stereotypes. All that remains is the statement.

In 2019 the LA Review of Books ran an article about Pete Buttigieg and his husband, which riffed off a cover image in Time magazine showing the two of them looking very normie together. The title of the piece was “Heterosexuality Without Women” and the strapline below was “This photo is about a lot of things, but one of its defining features is its heterosexuality.”

That’s the definition of gay as performing gayness. It’s not enough to be having sex with, indeed marrying, someone of the same sex. I guess Buttigieg and his husband just weren’t camp enough. That regression to stereotypes is depressing enough, but even as it was written it was already passé.

The previous year Miley Cyrus married Liam Hemsworth — a rich and beautiful heterosexual couple, her in a big white dress and him in a suit, photographed for a lifestyle magazine — and she said this was what a “queer wedding” looked like. I don’t have any pretensions to being anything other than boringly heterosexual, but I can tell you that wedding would have been far too hetero for me.

But Miley Cyrus understood what “queer” means much better than the author of the LA Review of Books article. It means nothing except saying “I’m queer.” And it’s the same with everything to do with gender identities. To have one is nothing more than to say you have one.

From experience of talking to a lot of people who haven’t been educated — indoctrinated if you like — in gender beliefs, they think that what is being talked about is either an observable personal characteristic, probably innate, or a serious physical or mental health condition. Something inherent and diagnosable. They think that to fail to acknowledge it in someone, and treat it if they are unhappy, would be unethical.

I think people inside the gender ritual know perfectly well that most people outside it totally misunderstand what they are saying. They know that the judges who side with the parent who wants to block puberty, and the social workers who say a 13-year-old should get cross-sex hormones, and the teachers who affirm a child’s gender, and the parents who go along with the gender therapist’s advice to use preferred pronouns, think that there is a special sort of person who is “trans”. But those inside the system know that all it takes to be this special sort of person is to say that you are this special sort of person.

When you finally see the gulf between what people outside the gender ritual think people inside the gender ritual are talking about, and what they are actually talking about, it makes the physical interventions even more monstrous. If what the clinics are selling is validation — and if Miley Cyrus and Liam Hemsworth can be “queer” in their utterly traditional white wedding — then why do the clinics give people drugs and surgeries? Why can’t they just say to their patients what they claim to believe: that women can have penises, men can get pregnant, trans women are women, trans men are men and non-binary identities are valid, and it’s transphobic to think you need to do anything to your body to validate your identity? Why do they stop the “wrong puberty” and cut off the penises and breasts? What even could “gender-affirming care” mean, when all that having a gender identity means is saying you have that gender identity?

They are trying to ride two horses, simultaneously claiming that this is medicine, which means you have to do medicine-like things — to claim that something is out of alignment, and that you are offering treatment to bring it back into alignment — but also claiming that people are what they say they are and trans people don’t “transition” because they always were whatever they say they are.

And why are they riding two horses? Well, the answer depends on how cynical you are. I have no doubt that a lot of the people inside the gender ritual have got lost in the contradictions, and genuinely think they are doing the right thing. But I will make three observations.

First, a lot of people who go into medical fields have a “saviour complex”. But even compared with other fields of medicine, gender medicine gives people a lot of power and a lot of self-validation as “good” and “progressive”. They get to rescue suffering children and help them to be reborn as the selves they were always meant to be. They get to remodel human flesh. And they get to lecture the world about morality while they’re at it.

Second, there’s something powerfully pagan about it: the greater the physical sacrifice the more real the belief. If you cut off parts of your body and sacrifice your reproductive system to your gender identity, then surely that gender identity is real. For all that devotees claim to take everyone’s claims about their gender identities at face value, it’s a bit unsatisfying to just leave it at that. Taking irreversible measures in the service of your gender identity is a type of commitment device: you’re showing that it’s really real, and you really mean it.

And third, this is a lucrative business. As the American journalist Upton Sinclair famously said: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

With Patrick Clarke of CASC, Riittakerttu Kaltiala of Tampere University and Jillian Spencer of Queensland Children’s Hospital, in the Adelaide Hills, October 19th 2025

I’ll publish the second of three parts of my keynote in a couple of days.